Differential calculus, check. Integral calculus, check. Tensor calculus: well, at least the University of Cambridge believes I can do this adequately, so check. Lambda calculus is not a problem; though I haven't got the complete exposure to β-reduction and whatnot, I can fake it plausibly enough; check.
I'd vaguely heard of the pi calculus before; I had ignored it as being something Computer Sciency that was more-or-less completely irrelevant to practical programming. I can't honestly say that yesterday's joint uk-lispers/scheme-uk meeting (or the ensuing discussion at the pub) opened my eyes or changed my mind about it, but it might be worth a second read anyway.
The context? Dan gave a talk about SBCL's threading implementation, based on Operating System threads (and not userland implementations); we talked, among other things, about clone(); futexes and furwocks; locking and safety in data structures; signal handling (with particular reference to Linux on the SPARC — you don't want to know); and the default value of dynamic (“special”) variables in new threads.
The pi calculus bit relates, if I understood things correctly, to what primitives the implementation threading model should expose. There are probably cool theoretical results, but the impression I got yesterday was that no-one yet had a real-world implementation of anything interesting... the idea is that pi calculus gives you a set of ultraprimitives on top of which, given operating system support, one can build all the locking and synchronization operations one would like; the current situation is that we provide a set of primitives that are good for building some things and bad at others. Clearly I need to go away and read about things.